Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday October 08, 2007 @10:26PM
from the barely-sung-heroes dept.

PMcGovern writes "Deadline for nominations for SysAdmin of the Year 2007 is this Friday Oct. 12. The award is sponsored by Slashdot, SourceForge, Digg, Usenix, Lopsa, Splunk, and Naspa. The first 2500 sysadmins nominated win a free SysAdmin Rockstar tee shirt. Prizes include a MacBook Pro, a non-bricked Apple iPhone, Gibson guitar, Splunk license, a full-paid trip to the LISA conference, cases of Red Bull, and more. If you know a sysadmin that goes beyond the call of duty, nominate them."

Really, the best sysadmin is one so good that he/she/it doesn't appear to do much of anything at all - because that's exactly what he/she/it should be doing. Who is really going to nominate a guy who seems to just sit around while everything around him seems to work just perfectly?

Thus, the contest is biased. You'll either get:

A) The guy that always seems "industrious", nominated by people who aren't sysadmins, or

B) The guy that seems "lazy", sits around not doing much at all while dozens to hundreds of carefully written scripts fire off all day long, sending an occasional message when an error condition is detected. Since this guy would have to be nominated by a sysadmin, and sysadmins are in the minority, this contest is biased in favor of the incompetent.

Isn't he best sysadmin the one you don't know is there. I find in general Bad Sysadmins are the ones complaining all the time, and always working very hard with fires, Complain about the pager because they know it will go off. While good sysadmins are rarely seen unless they want to be so. Because they have the organization running so well and smooth that most problems are preemptively fixed, the ones that are not have enough backup and fail over that he can fix without disrupting anyone else's work. That is a good sysadmin... The problem with that is they are also the first ones to be considered for layoffs because they don't seem to be working hard... But they learn in a couple of months that his job was necessary.